In recent months, I have taught remedial sessions for high school graduates of our public schools. These sessions focus on basic writing skills, grammar and syntax. Students are taught the basic 5-paragraph essay in order to re-take the two-year college entrance exam. As a teacher of these sessions, I am given a script of subjects / material to be covered in each session.

The majority of my students have been African American, Black Americans and a sprinkling of student immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

It saddens me to recognize semester after semester that a number of these students and a number of students I have taught at the college level are unable to distinguish between a fragment and a sentence or unable to comprehend the theme or message of a mainstream newspaper article.

In �The Dangerous Drift Back towards Segregated Schools,� Marian Wright Edelman has for years noted the obliteration of anything that can be called education for all children in the U.S., particularly for Black children. Dr. Wright Edelman calls attention to two recent school board decisions in North Carolina that she sees as a �troubling national trend toward re-segregation in public schools.� Lengthy debates regarding �redistricting plans� preceded each decision by the school boards in New Hanover County (including Wilmington) and in Wake County.

In New Hanover, the debate on a new middle school redistricting plan focused on ��neighborhood schools,�� she writes. The �redistricting plan� would re-segregate schools according to race and to economic class �because our neighborhoods look that way.�

Sounds like a �humanitarian� �neoliberal� plan that would benefit �neighborhood� school children, right? Except that these neighborhood schools are already predominately Black and segregated!

According to Dr. Wright Edelman, the only white and Republican member of the school board joined two Black Democratic members in challenging the plan. Last fall, Elizabeth Redenbaugh and the two Black Democratic members sent a letter to parents and other members of the school board. In the end, the three were overruled earlier this year in a 4-3 vote.

Redenbaugh described what she witnessed during the debate with �Dr. Wright Edelman. Parents approached Redenbaugh and told her that they didn�t want their children in school with Black children. Why, these parents ask, do we do anything ��at all for black children in our county��? Redenbaugh continues: They look me in the eye and say, we�ve spent too much money on Black children. ��Nothing helps.��

Such statements literally grieve my heart and beg the question: Who is my neighbor?�

In neighboring Wake County, more of the same!

As Dr. Wright Edelman writes, in Wake County, including Raleigh, �schools may be moving backward in a similar direction.� On March 4, 2010 the school board voted �to begin studying a new districting plan that would change the current busing system and reassign students based on �neighborhood attendance zones.�� In other words, as Dr. Wright Edelman explains, segregate the schools �because of the neighborhood demographics.�

Keep the problem in the margins of society - where it is anyway - so many believe.

No parent, no matter his or her race, wants to send their child to a school where they have to pass through a metal detector. In a Dr. Martin Luther King�s Dream world that would be unnecessary. No parent, no matter his or her race, wants to send their child to a school to sit next to another child whose parent or parents care less about the child�s education or the quality of that education. No parent, no matter his or her race, wants to send their child to school to sit next to a fledging gang member. No parent, no matter his or her race, wants to send their child to school to sit next to another who thinks learning to read and write, to think, is a waste of time. No parent, no matter his or her race, wants to send their child to school to sit in a classroom where the teacher has low expectations of his or her students or who thinks the students are inferior.

If a good many parents are now disinterested in the education of their children or the quality of that education, we should ask how did this happen? What were the circumstances surrounding their education?

In addition to recalling the history of desegregating schools in the U.S. and the historic Brown vs. Board of Education and the Supreme Court�s 2007 ruling that the �desegregation plans that assign students to schools on the basis of race are unconstitutional� (Dr. Wright Edelman), we need to also look at what integration has achieved in the Black community.

Black children are not mentally inferior but they have been sold an inferior educational process that divorces them from empowering narratives and images of themselves and their community. In the past forty years, there has been a systematic, institutionalized effort to separate Black children from cultural references in which they can see themselves as individuals in a collective that has long striven to challenge an undemocratic society. Instead, Black children, generation after generation, particularly since the Reagan Era, have been told a narrative and shown images of themselves in alignment with the racist narratives and images that surrounded enslaved Blacks. But enslaved Black knew who they were and many died or suffered as a result of trying to learn to read and write. Once Emancipation came, many sought to learn; others began schools to teach themselves and the children in newly established communities.

What happened to this people, this mindset since those years? How much of a threat did these average ex-enslaved people pose to the nation-state and why? Why after the establishment of Affirmative Action was the ruling declared unconstitutional and dismantled? Why are we now confronted with Black teens for whom freedom is being a consumer of cheap goods and democracy means everyone can shop at Wal-Mart or everyone can carry around a Blackberry and still not have a clue as to who was David Walker or Rodney Walters and still have not ever read a Gwendolyn Brooks poem or a Toni Morrison novel. How do we engage our young so that Sojourner Truth speaks to them?

No matter what the plan is called under whatever president, the agenda has been the same: keep this Black community ignorant of its strength and power. And the way to do this is to appear innocent of the crime of capitalism and the practice of a slow but thorough genocide while supporting a policy that when implemented on the micro-level treat Black children as contending with the infantile only fit to wander in the wilderness for another forty years. Nothing helps because those who benefit don�t plan to change their policy toward Black Americans. Fear won�t allow them to change!

Those cultural references are powerful and threatening as is the Black child who dares to want to learn who she or he is - historically.

What parent or Black teacher during Reconstruction would tolerate indifference to learning or any behavior deemed disrespectful to themselves or to the community? The Black parent and Black teacher with a vested entrance in saving and cultivating cultural references (empowering narratives and images) would not tolerate substandard anything from Black children!

Black parents and Black teachers are no longer free to educate Black children. While King�s Dream may have appealed to those who thought �America would be true to its promise� of democracy, it has proven to be not only a disaster but most important, a criminal act of genocide against the Black American population. Lost in the political, social and cultural wilderness, our community has not only lost its way but its cultural reference points: for many there is no past nor future - only the present, today and now, this moment!

Before the Dream and a leap of some Black Americans into the stream, we should have spent the last forty years, as Malcolm suggested, getting our own act together. Then we could have reached the same conclusion with Dr. King that America needs to turn to democratic socialism. But, in terms of education, fear of the Black population wasn�t limited to white school administrators and faculty. The Black elite have turned their backs on Black America. Betraying the struggle for justice for all, the Black elite accepts the just-us integration plan, a corruption cover-up plan.

I believe we leaped for the Dream of integration and received the nightmare of fear.

I agree with Dr. Wright Edelman who refers to Gary Orfield�s findings in the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles: segregated schools are not good for anyone. �We already know they are disastrous for poor and minority students, for whom there is a strong connection between school segregation, failing schools, and high dropout rates.� Studies show, she argues, that the transfer of Black and Brown children to �inter-district� schools �to improve integration, improve the �life chances� of those children while showing no �negative effect on the academic progress of students in the receiving district.�

But, between a study at this university and a study at this institute for policy, we are experimenting with the life chances of so many other Black children. How much money is wasted on studies while Black children and the community as a whole continue to see its future consumed by fear? Having taught in increasingly post-racial academic environments where it is almost a crime to even refer to Black students or Black subjects outside the month of February, I am weary about the curriculum at these schools where Black and Brown enter as bodies in seats but not as thinkers and doers, contributors to all fields of study (math, science, literature, history, social science, philosophy etc). Are we to accept that we are the objects of university studies of pathology or criminality in the U.S.? Is the Black child who transfers to an integrated classroom to believe that he or she must overcome portrayals of Black pathology and criminality supplied by endless studies and media images of Black Americans? How much of the heritage they carry within them would they have to shed in order to experience those �life chances� in an integrated American classroom? Will white children and immigrant children to this country continue to embody a sense of entitlement and power as they climb the ladder on the bodies of Black Americans?

We must reject the knowledge that Black Americans are only fit for becoming high or low paid servants of the system destroying us all.

A segregated America is not good for any citizen, but politicians will play politics with each other with no concern for justice.

It is not a question of segregation vs. integration but a question of justice, fairness, freedom - allowing people to be free to be, allowing Black Americans to be human and fulfill their potential as human beings. It�s as if we�ve died since those many years back when housewives decided to walk rather than ride those apartheid buses. It�s as if we died when Fred Hampton was murdered and our desire to feed and educate our children died too.

Civil Rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) suggests that we go back, pick up the struggle where Dr. Martin L. King left off. It�s all of us or none of us, she argues. For Dr. King, �a human rights movement� held revolutionary potential,� Dr. Alexander writes. Therefore, we must, as Dr. Alexander offers, pick up where Dr. King left off and resume the poor people�s campaign.

A poor people�s campaign would encompass human violations, including the criminal educational system. I would suggest that one way to engage the poor people�s campaign is to begin by taking back the responsibility of educating our children. As Black people concerned about our future, our children, the survival of our heritage of anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism - within the poor peoples� campaign - we need to establish a space in our communities where we empower our children beyond fear. Sending a few ideal Black children to sit next to white students so white parents feel less fearful ultimately dehumanizes us. We have masses of Black children and young adults who can�t read or write - and they have attitudes, anger as a result of being forced to survive their dehumanization by unconsciously or consciously collaborating in the process of destroying their humanity. But we have to engage this population! All of us or none of us!

An individual here and there isn�t enough. But a movement that begins with one or two and starts in one�s neighborhood can�t be stifled by the fear of those who would prohibit our efforts. This movement must be a collective movement aimed at dismantling the War on Drugs while targeting poverty, homelessness, unemployment. Such a movement would chip away at warmongering, imperialism, capitalism, and RACISM, dismantling the structure that reinforces an undemocratic response to the presence of the majority of people in the U.S. and around the world. Much is at stake, and we can�t ask another people to move beyond their fear. Those of us who are Black must take the first step and be willing to step up again, at this time in history, and to teach our Black children the story of our survival and our future.

Obviously, no one else will!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.